Chas Smith

Chas Smith is the author of the best-selling Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction, Cocaine + Surfing, Reports From Hell and Blessed are the Bank Robbers, which was selected as one of the best crime books of the year by The New York Times. Chas began his writing career as a foreign correspondent, penning pieces for Vice, Paper and Blackbook, amongst others, from Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Azerbaijan and Colombia which led to a brief career as a war correspondent for Current TV. After being kidnapped by Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war he transitioned to surf journalism where he was a featured writer at the brash Stab before becoming Editor at Large at Surfing Magazine. There he developed a reputation as the most controversial voices in the space. Matt Warshaw, author of the Encyclopedia of Surfing, calls him, “Bright and hyper-ironic.” William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Barbarian Days, says that Chas, “…calls it like he sees it and in surfing that’s not usually the case.” Chas Smith is co-owner of a surf website, BeachGrit.